Saturday, May 31, 2014

Now that we will never have the chance to study Elliot Rodger or to offer him any more psychotherapy, the nation wants to understand what made him do what he did.

At the least, the psychologists assure us, sex would not have solved Rodger's problems.

Presumably, they were responding to this question: if the
chronically isolated and sexually frustrated Rodger had actually had sex, would
he have been less inclined to slaughter his roommates and shoot down some
sorority girls.

For all the money his parents were spending on
therapy, why didn't they hire an escort to teach him about the joy of sex? Isn’t that the idea behind the girlfriend experience?Obviously, they would not have had to tell him that they were doing so.

Apparently, the idea never crossed their minds. Considering
how disturbed Rodger was, the chances are very good that it would not have
helped him.

On that the psychologists interviewed by Regina Gorham of CBS Hartford are
correct.

If, in fact, Rodger was schizophrenic, he was beyond the
ministrations of even the most capable escort, or for that matter, therapist.

While the psychologists see Rodger as anti-social, they do
not consider the possibility that his problems were more physiological than
psychological. Surely, if Rodger’s own therapists had failed to recognize a
psychosis or a brain defect—deserving medication and/or involuntary
commitment-- they could not have done a very good job.

Unfortunately, expert therapists do not bring a great deal to the conversation. They declare the Rodger was lacking in empathy and
that he was narcissistic.

In truth, today’s therapists say exactly the same thing about almost anyone. These
are the go-to explanations for every form of social inadequacy.

In truth, they are using the occasion to show off
their own theories. Most seem to have no real sense of Elliot Rodger.

Their efforts to cure all problems with empathy is clearly in error. Even if we assume that
Rodger could have been taught empathy, the attempt to rejigger his feelings, to
feel everyone else’s pain would have been for naught if he lacked social and
conversational skills.

And what if he liked feeling pain? Nothing about empathy
prevents an individual from causing pain because he likes to feel the pain
himself.

CBS reports the views of one therapist:

“If
Rodger had the capacity to be in a real, loving relationship I would imagine
that he would have been much less capable of such callous behavior towards
others,” clinical social worker and psychotherapist Laura Miller told CBS
Hartford. “His disconnect from the humanity of others and their inherent worth
would likely preclude any such relationship from occurring, however. So I don’t
think having a girlfriend or sex is the issue here, but rather a direct result
of his lack of self-awareness and lack of empathy towards those around him.”

For Miller the problem is psychological, not medical. She
assumes that if only Rodger had been able to feel the right feelings he would
have been able to interact with other people.

“There
are several recurring themes in the manifesto and I would say that one of the
most predominant features of it is narcissism,” she said. “Much of his
arguments and perceptions are based on being narcissist. He didn’t appear to
have a way of viewing reality from other peoples’ points of view. The entire
document seemed to show that he only viewed it from his own perspective. He
would attribute motives to other people or blame to the popular people when in
reality, he had the major role in it.”

In truth, most male beings are slightly deficient in
empathy. If you want to compete in the arena you do best not be too sensitive
about the pain you are going to inflict you your opponents.

As for Rodger’s supposed narcissism, it ought to be evident
that many other conditions can produce this kind of asocial character, like
they Asperger’s syndrome, schizophrenia or even a brain tumor.

CBS calls Dr. Michael Broder a renowned psychologist, so we
are naturally very interested in hearing what he has to say:

“If I
have to guess there is something that created barriers between him and women
that made dating not work and then of course he has this extreme reaction,”
Broder said. “The thing that strikes me more than anything else is that
behavior like this does not happen just like that. With killers like Adam
Lanza, James Holmes, and Rodger, there has to be warning signs that these
extreme actions can take place. There has to be something, some kind of social
distancing such as Asperger’s syndrome in play, but an extremely tiny number of
people who have it have those kind of behavioral issues.”

“Antisocial
personalities like these mass killers need unfortunately a kind of help that
they are least likely to seek out, which involves a real human connection with
a therapist who can also monitor their behavior closely enough to protect them
from becoming dangerous and take necessary precautions when possible.”

As it happened, Aurora shooter James Holmes’s psychiatrist
did see it coming. She understood that he was schizophrenic. She alerted the
authorities. They could do not do anything about it.

Broder is correct to say that therapy patients do need to
form a meaningful connection with their patients. Most competent therapists
know this and do their best to establish such a connection.

But, some therapists do not. Among them, the more orthodox
Freudian psychoanalysts, who make a virtue out of disconnection.

We know that Rodger was seeing a therapist nearly every day
when he was in high school. To me, this suggests that he was undergoing orthodox
psychoanalysis or some variation thereupon.

Perhaps Broder is intimating that we cannot understand
Rodger without knowing what was happening in his psychoanalytic therapy? Many of Rodger's thoughts sound like reconstituted Freudian theory. They may not be true to the letter of Freud's text, but we can certainly speculate about where he learned them.

Could it be that his analyst taught him that the meaning of
his pain was his failure to have sex?

Could it be that his analyst taught him that good sex would
solve his problems?

Did psychoanalysis teach him that other men were obstacles
to his sexual gratification, to be eliminated by a man who had fully embraced
his Oedipus complex?

And, did psychoanalysis turn his “narcissism” into high
self-esteem, thus convincing this sad young man that if women did not want him,
the fault lay with them, not with him.

Doesn’t high self-esteem teach people
that they need do nothing to improve themselves, because the fault lies with
other people?

For
years, our continental neighbours have been applauded as chic, slim and poised
- all achieved seemingly without effort.

They
are famed for never putting on weight - despite enjoying a rich diet of foie
gras, escargot and croissants.

Be this as it may, a recent survey has discovered that,
given the choice, French women would prefer a gourmet meal to sex.

Sacre
bleu!

The Daily
Mail
reports:

When
asked what 'pleasure rating' they'd give eating, [French women] said 7.1. out
of 10, while they'd rank sex 6.7.

Sexologist
Gerard Leleu attempted to shed some light on this rather surprising result of
Harris Interative's survey.

He told
Stylist magazine: 'Chemically, the same thing happens in the brain during a
"culinary orgasm" and a sexual orgasm.

'In
fact, when we are sad and we decide to eat chocolate, we are actually
masturbating the hypothalamus.'

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Anyway, for all anyone knows, this seems not to speak very
well of the way French men behave in the boudoir.

One expert tried to explain it by saying that French women
must be having “crepe sex.”

Bon
Dieu!

The same expert suggested that perhaps it all means that
French women are narcissistic:

Perhaps
some of these women find posh food more of an enjoyable indulgence than sex
because the former is entirely about self-satisfaction - you choose what to eat
based entirely on your own whims and tastes, whereas with sex you have to
consider the desires and needs of your partner too.

Imagine the indignity.

Then again, maybe French women know something that other
women don’t. Can 74% of French women be wrong?

Bloomberg decried the fact that orthodox liberal opinion had
monopolized the marketplace of ideas on America’s college campuses. A brief
glance at campaign contributions told him, as it has told many others that
nearly all academics lean left.

Effectively, there is no diversity of opinion on American
college campuses.

It may feel like a quibble, but Bloomberg is wrong to say that
these campuses are infested with liberalism. There is nothing liberal, in the
classical sense of the word, in groupthink. There is nothing liberal in
shouting down opposing points of view. There is nothing liberal in the total
absence of conservative commencement speakers.

When new Harvard graduate Sandra Korn—presumably in the
audience for Bloomberg’s speech—can promote what she calls justice at the
expense of academic freedom and when she identifies it with a movement to
single out and punish the state of Israel, the only liberal democracy in the
Middle East, we are dealing with anti-Semitic radicalism.

It’s good to call things by their correct names.

Bloomberg was also correct to call out the college
administrators who have allowed it all to happen by refusing to punish those
who disrupt the speech of speakers whose ideas they do not accept.

In his words:

Last
fall, our police commissioner was invited to deliver a lecture at another Ivy
League institution, but he was unable to do so because students shouted him
down.

Isn’t
the purpose of a university to stir discussion, not silence it? What were the
students afraid of hearing?

Why did
administrators not step in to prevent the mob from silencing speech?

And did
anyone consider that it is morally and pedagogically wrong to deprive other
students the chance to hear the speech?

And yet, administrators do not make the hiring decisions. If
academic departments are filled with empty-headed radicals who see their task
more in terms of indoctrination and cultural revolution than in teaching
students, the fault also lies with the departments themselves.

The twin demons of political correctness and identity
politics have brought us to this crisis point, and under current conditions,
there is very little that anyone can do about it.

Unless, of course, the person in question is Michael
Bloomberg.

Remember when Bill Gates and Warren Buffett initiated their Giving
Pledge, wherein they encouraged the world’s billionaires to give half of their
money to charity. In practice, this probably means, giving the money to leftist
do-gooders, but, why quibble?

Bloomberg would have made some real news yesterday if he had
announced that, as long as American universities insist on presenting only one
point of view and as long as they systematically silence dissent, he will not
give them any money. Moreover, he will ask other billionaires and aspiring
billionaires to make the same pledge.

By now, I fear that that is the only language that the
academy will understand.

Call it the Lysistrata Pledge, in honor of the Spartan woman
who rallied her sisters to try to end a war by withholding sex. When it comes to America's colleges, money is the real sex.

It’s time to sanction universities for
having ceased to be temples of learning and for having become cells for
brainwashing students.

True enough, university departments of science, engineering
and math will suffer too. It does not quite seem fair because it isn’t fair.
Still and all, how else are you going to get the attention of college
administrators and take a step toward returning America’s universities to
classical liberal values.

Given that I lived for several years in France I naturally
consider myself an expert on French food. Of course, I have not been back to
visit in quite some time, but still, I believe that, whatever you say about
France, the food is outstanding.

In a culture that has long defined itself on the excellence
of its cuisine, McDonalds set off something of a stir in 1999. Then a French
farmer name Jose Bove was thrown in jail for trashing a McDonalds.

Bove was an anti-globalization activist and was defending
the honor of French culture against the Anglo invader.

That was yesterday. Today, the world has changed.

By now, France has been blanketed with McDonalds. One
knows that the French restaurants serve McBaguettes and one suspects that the hamburgers
taste better in Lyon than they do in my neighborhood, but still, given the
choice, the French like their Big Macs.

Recently, in the town of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, near Lille,
local bureaucrats stopped construction on a new McDonalds because the
restaurant did not comply with regulations.

(Even if the burgers are not the same the world over, the
bureaucrats are.)

Surprisingly, perhaps, the local citizens were outraged… at
the bureaucrats. 4,000 signed up on a Facebook page to protest. They took to
the streets to oppose the job-killing bureaucrats.

President Obama believes that the most salient foreign
policy question is: to war or not to war.

Evidently, his was a lame concept. When he offered it up to
the graduating class at West Point, they sat in stark silence. The mainstream
Obamaphile media greeted it with derision.

After over five years in office Barack Obama still does not
know what foreign policy is about. He’s giving on-the-job training a bad name.

NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel knows
something about foreign policy. He knows that it’s about developing
relationships between nations. When Ken Langone asked Engel to name a nation
that had better relations with the United States under Obama, Engel was
stumped.

“I
think you would be hard pressed to find that,”​ [Engel] told Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone​
on CNBC on Thursday.

“You
would naturally want to say Europe, but generally the relations with a lot of
European countries have gotten worse,” he added.

Engel
explained that the Obama administration’s withdrawal from world affairs has
“very rapidly” left a vacuum. The “vortex of instability” has led other
countries to be unsure about what role the United States wants to take on the
global stage, he said, especially following the “army-first, or fist-first”
approach of the Bush presidency.

“Right
now, we have a black hole in Syria, Iraq is in a state of collapse, Libya is
about to go back into a civil war,” he said. “I think there is a lot of
problems on the horizon in the foreign-policy world, just because you are
off-ramping in Afghanistan.”

Keep in mind, Engel works for NBC News. No network has been
more fervent in its support of our fearless leader.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

What is it? You probably did not guess, but it’s Tracey Emin’s
bed. It’s the real bed, with real dirty sheets and other assorted real
detritus. It has no redeeming aesthetic value, but Emin is an artist, so it’s a
work of art. Apparently, it made art history… because it’s a statement… of
what, no one seems to know.

“My
Bed” will be sold at auction at Christie’s on July 1, and has been given an
estimate price of between £800,000 and £1.2m (approximately $1.35 million to $2
million), which seems astonishingly low given the piece’s cultural impact.
Indeed, David Maupin, Emin’s dealer in New York who sold the bed to Saatchi in
2000 for £150,000 (about $252,000), has said he thinks the Christie’s estimate is too low.
“It’s historic. It’s priceless.”

How does Emin explain herself? Like this:

The bed
was made at a time of Emin’s life when, as she put it, “I had a kind of mini nervous breakdown in
my very small flat and didn't get out of bed for four days. And when I did
finally get out of bed, I was so thirsty I made my way to the kitchen crawling
along the floor. My flat was in a real mess—everything everywhere, dirty
washing, filthy cabinets, the bathroom really dirty, everything in a really bad
state. I crawled across the floor, pulled myself up on the sink to get some
water, and made my way back to my bedroom, and as I did I looked at my bedroom
and thought, ‘Oh, my God. What if I'd died and they found me here?’

“And
then I thought, ‘What if here wasn't here? What if I took out this bed—with all
its detritus, with all the bottles, the shitty sheets, the vomit stains, the
used condoms, the dirty underwear, the old newspapers—what if I took all of
that out of this bedroom and placed it into a white space? How would it look
then?’ And at that moment I saw it, and it looked fucking brilliant.”

Apparently, she sees it as a moment captured in time. And she thinks that this agglomeration of vomit stains and used condoms and dirty underwear looks brilliant. It also looks shameless. It also looks as though someone does not have an aesthetic.

Of course, the joke is on any collector who believes this
rot. And yet, it is fair to notice that the collector who bought this is will
soon be laughing his way to the bank.

The media has fomented a narrative whereby the Republican Party
is divided between corporatist RINOs and Tea Party activists. By the terms of the
narrative, the two factions are dividing the party, to the point where they
will eventually bring it to wrack and ruin.

One expects as much from the mainstream media. After all,
they are no longer about providing the best and most accurate information.
They have refashioned themselves into the drivers of the narrative.

Whatever you think of it, it's not journalism.

In the meantime, Republicans have bought the narrative. They
have taken up residence in it, to the benefit of Democrats. To the dismay
of more conservative voices in the party, far too many Republicans have gone to
war against their fellow Republicans, leaving Democrats to pick up the spoils.

After all, Mitt Romney, the last standard bearer, won the
nomination by trashing other Republicans. When it came to the presidential
election he could not bring himself to attack Barack Obama. He lost.

Now, he seems to be angling for another shot at losing an
election. A smart Republican Party would reject him.

In the meantime, it takes a sensible Democrat like Joel Kotkin to expose the fault lines within the Democratic Party. As the
cognoscenti ponder whether capitalism suffers from internal contradictions, we
do well to examine Kotkin’s analysis of the internal contradictions within the
Democratic Party.

If Democrats did not have Republicans to hate and if the
Republicans were not wasting themselves attacking each other, the Democratic
Party would likely implode from its own internal contradictions.

As Kotkin sees it, the Democratic Party is divided among the
gentry (tech oligarchs and Wall Street bankers, the populist progs (leftist
intellectuals and minorities) and bubbas (the DLC and labor unions).

Their interests are not the same, so they seem to be held
together by a common enemy—the Republican Party.

Kotkin begins with the gentry liberals, the group that has
profited from Obama administration policies:

This
group currently dominates the party, and have
the least reason to object to the current administration’s performance. All in
all, the gentry have generally done well in the recovery, benefiting from
generally higher stock and real estate prices. They tend to reside in the
affluent parts of coastal metropolitan areas, where Democrats now dominate.

The
liberal gentry have been prime beneficiaries of key Obama policies, including
ultra-low interest rates, the bailout of the largest financial institutions and
its subsidization of “green” energy. Wall Street Democrats also profit from the
expansion of government since, as Walter Russell Mead points out, so many make money
from ever-expanding public debt.

These 1%ers have no real conception of how their policies impact other members
of the Democratic electorate:

What
most marks the gentry, particularly in California, is their insensitivity to
the impact of their policies on working-class and middle-class voters. They may
support special breaks for the poor, but are in deep denial about how high
energy and housing prices – in part due to “green” policies – are driving
companies and decent-paying jobs from the state. The new “cap and trade” regime about to be
implemented figures to push up gasoline and electricity prices for
middle-income consumers, who, unlike the poor, have little chance of getting
subsidies from Sacramento. High energy prices, one assumes, have less impact on
the Bay Area or West Los Angeles Tesla- and BMW-driving oligarchy than to
people living in the more extreme climate and spread-out interior regions.

Gentry liberals dominate important social institutions. One
might even say that they have completely monopolized the marketplace of ideas
in those areas:

The
gentry liberals’ power stems from their dominion over most of the key
institutions – the media, the universities, academia and high-tech – that provide both cash and credibility to
the current administration.

And then there is the populist, progressive wing of the
party. Kotkin describes them:

Many
more traditional left-leaning members of the Democratic Party – whom I would call
the populist progressives – recognize that the Obama years have been a disaster
for much of the party’s traditional constituencies, notably, minorities.
Although the nation’s increasingly wide class divides and stunted upward
mobility has been developing for years, they have widened ever more under
Obama, as the wealthy and large corporations have enjoyed record prosperity.

This segment of the party militates for redistributionist
policies, policies that will, in principle, help the poor at the expense of the
rich, but that will, in practice, help the poor at the expense of the middle
class.

In Kotkin’s words:

But the
populists’ often-blunderbuss redistributionist tendencies – seen most notably
in deep blue big cities – could alienate
many middle-class voters who, for good reasons, suspect that this
redistribution will come largely at their expense.

And then there’s the group that Kotkin calls “the old social
Democrats.” These are the bubba voters, most especially the labor unions that
have generously funded Democratic campaigns.

Kotkin calls them the “weakest part of the Democratic Party:”

This
group is the most closely associated with private-sector labor, manufacturing
and areas dependent on fossil-fuel production. Long dependent on white
working-class voters, they are the most threatened by the increasingly hostile attitudes among them to President
Obama and his gentry liberal regime. Already, some building trade unions in Ohio, angry about delays on
the Keystone XL pipeline and other infrastructure projects, have even shifted
toward the GOP.

One suspects that the group also includes public sector
labor unions.

The power of labor unions has depended on their ability to
finance political campaigns. What will happen to that influence when more billionaires
are capable of contributing the same amount of money by writing a check? What will happen when they try to unionize Silicon Valley?

And, what will happen to the party when minority voters
learn that voting en masse for one party, no matter what, causes that party to
take them for granted. What will happen when minority voters demand results for
their votes? What will happen when they cannot be so easily manipulated by
cries of racism and amnesty?

When it comes to diversity Google is not where it’s at.
Whatever its commitment to liberal politics, Google has been mostly hiring
white and Asian males.

70% of the Google workforce is male and 91% is white or
Asian.

Time magazine reports:

According
to the data, released Wednesday for the first time, 70 percent of the Google
workforce is male and 61 percent of its workers are white. And while
Asian-Americans make up 30 percent of the workforce, African-Americans and
Hispanics make up two and three percent, respectively.

In a
statement on the company blog, Google said that it considers racial and gender
imbalance to be a problem, and speculates about the underlying causes.

Citing
stats from a 2012 National Science Foundation report, Google
says that recruitment of people of color and women is difficult because,
“Blacks and Hispanics make up under 10 percent of U.S. college grads and
collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in CS majors” and because that only 18
percent of the computer science degrees awarded in the U.S. go to women.

If you like, here’s the graph that Google provided:

Google reached this point of minimal diversity because most
of the Computer Science degrees are awarded to white and Asian males. Some
women qualify-- one wonders how many of them are white or Asian-- but precious few blacks and Hispanics are majoring in the
subjects that would suit Google.

In any event, Google feels badly about this. It is investing
in advanced minority education.

One suspects that these new disclosures are more about PR
than anything else.

Too much of a good thing is bad. So is too little. This
applies even to water. Drinking too much water, like drinking too little water,
is bad for you.

The questions is: How bad is how much?

The same applies to porn. In moderation, it is probably not
a problem. Consumed excessively it might affect your brain… and not in a good
way.

Then again, researchers are not sure whether people who
suffer a certain brain affliction are driven to watch porn or whether
porn-watching, in and of itself, changes the brain. Then again, it could be
both.

In a world that is awash in porn, to say nothing of
decadence, these questions are becoming more germane.

Men who
report watching a lot of pornography tend to have less volume and activity in
regions of the brain linked to rewards and motivation, says a new German study.

The
study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, can't say watching porn caused the
decrease in brain matter and activity, however.

It's
not clear, for example, whether watching porn leads to brain changes or whether
people born with certain brain types watch more porn, said Simone Kühn, the
study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in
Berlin, in an email.

We do not know whether porn watching demotivates you and
drains your… ambition… or whether people who are unmotivated and unambitious
are more likely to watch more porn. Or both.

Either way, it does not look as though watching too much
porn is doing anyone any good:

“We
found that the volume of the so-called striatum, a brain region that has been
associated with reward processing and motivated behavior was smaller the more
pornography consumption the participants reported,” Kühn said.

“Moreover
we found that another brain region, that is also part of the striatum that is
active when people see sexual stimuli, shows less activation the more
pornography participants consumed,” she added.

What’s
more, the researchers found that the connection between the striatum and
prefrontal cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain associated with
behavior and decision making, worsened with increased porn watching.

Of course, Kuhn added, many other activities, like driving a
taxi, are also linked to changes in the brain.

Let’s say that the question is still open. The research is
just beginning. At a time when young people have more access to more porn than
ever before in history, no one should remain indifferent to the consequences.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Readers of this blog know that I have long suggested that we
would do well to commit dangerous schizophrenics involuntarily. This means, we
should be able to provide psychiatric treatment to severely ill patients, even
if they refuse it.

Intuitively, it feels easier to institutionalize a few
dangerous psychotics than to remove nearly 300,000,000 guns from the hands of American
citizens.

Other problems exist. Beyond the civil liberties concerns,
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey points out that even if we decide on more lax standards
for involuntary commitment, we do not have enough psychiatric beds to treat all
the patients. After all, we, as a nation decided on a policy of deinstitutionalization
several decades ago. We are now, as the Bible says, reaping the whirlwind.

For my part, I would like to know how many other civilized
nations allow schizophrenics to wander around at will. How many nations refuse
to treat psychotics until they commit a horrific act of violence, against
themselves and others. Even if these patients do not commit violent actions, do we have a moral responsibility to offer them treatment when they are incapable of deciding what is best for themselves.

This morning Dr. Richard Friedman offered a cogent argument
against involuntary commitment in The New York Times.

It is worth examining in detail.

Friedman explains:

While
it is true that most mass killers have a psychiatric illness, the vast majority
of violent people are not mentally ill and most mentally ill people are not
violent. Indeed, only about 4 percent of overall violence in the United States
can be attributed to those with mental illness. Most homicides in the United
States are committed by people without mental illness who use guns.

These are good points. And yet, the issue is not gun
violence, but the treatment of psychosis. Besides, psychosis is not an
ordinary mental illness. Research suggests that it is a brain disease.

No one is suggesting that all people who suffer from mental
illness—the latest version of the DSM defines so many varieties that just about
everyone qualifies—should be subjected to involuntary hospitalization.

While it is true that most homicides are committed by people
who are not mentally ill, the fact that we cannot stop all of the violence does
not mean that we should not stop some of it.

One must note that most gun homicides are committed by gang
members in large American cities. How many of these cities have strict gun
control laws? Anyone who believes that stricter gun control will solve anything
should explain how well it’s working in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and
Washington, DC.

Then, Dr. Friedman suggests that the link between violence
and major mental illness is real:

Large
epidemiologic studies show that psychiatric illness is a risk factor for
violent behavior, but the risk is small and linked only to a few serious mental
disorders. People with schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder were
two to three times as likely as those without these disorders to be violent.
The actual lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental
illness is about 16 percent compared with 7 percent among people who are not
mentally ill.

Again, the issue is not so much who will or will not commit
violent acts, though those who suffer from severe mental illness are far more
likely to do so. The issue is whether it is good or bad policy to treat
schizophrenics against their will.

If we are talking only about violence, Dr. Friedman notes,
people suffering from drug or alcohol addiction are very likely to commit
violent acts:

What
most people don’t know is that drug and alcohol abuse are far more powerful
risk factors for violence than other psychiatric illnesses. Individuals who
abuse drugs or alcohol but have no other psychiatric disorder are almost seven
times more likely than those without substance abuse to act violently.

It is worth asking how many of these addicts are
self-medicating, that is, treating a severe psychiatric illness with their own
kind of medication.

He continues:

Would
lowering the threshold for involuntary psychiatric treatment, as some argue, be
effective in preventing mass killings or homicide in general? It’s doubtful.

The
current guideline for psychiatric treatment over the objection of the patient
is, in most states, imminent risk of harm to self or others. Short of issuing a
direct threat of violence or appearing grossly disturbed, you will not receive
involuntary treatment. When Mr. Rodger was interviewed by the police after his
mother expressed alarm about videos he had posted, several weeks ago, he
appeared calm and in control and was thus not apprehended. In other words, a
normal-appearing killer who is quietly planning a massacre can easily evade
detection.

It is surely possible to evade detection in a single
interview, but people who spent time with Elliot Rodger and Adam Lanza knew
perfectly well that they looked crazy.

Dr. Torrey offers a different take on the issue:

Many
individuals who are psychiatrically disturbed are able to “hang it together”
for a few minutes when confronted by a police officer, judge, etc. I have had
very psychotic patients appear quite rational for 10 minutes in a courtroom by
focusing their mind. Patients with Parkinson’s disease can similarly suppress
their tremor briefly by focusing their mind on it. Thus, it is unrealistic to
expect a police officer to make a clinical evaluation, and such evaluations
should include a mental health professional.

Here, Dr. Torrey raises the issue of the competence of
mental health professionals. If no psychiatrist understood how ill Adam Lanza was,
that can mean that he hid his illness very well or else that the psychiatrists
were not doing a very good job.

Keep in mind, Elliot Rodger availed himself fully of the
resources provided by the mental health system. He saw multiple therapists for
many, many years.

Ought we not to question their competence and the
effectiveness of the treatments they were offering.

Finally, Dr. Friedman explains that if we made it easier to
commit patients involuntarily, other patients might be discouraged from
availing themselves of treatment.

In his words:

In the
wake of these horrific killings, it would be understandable if the public
wanted to make it easier to force treatment on patients before a threat is
issued. But that might simply discourage other mentally ill people from being
candid and drive some of the sickest patients away from the mental health care
system.

The point might have some validity in some cases. And yet,
the notion of involuntary commitment assumes that the sickest patients systematically
refuse all dealings with the mental health system.

We cannot, Dr. Friedman correctly notes, predict violent
behavior, but we can see when someone is severely ill and incapable of making a
rational decision about care.

He writes:

We have
always had — and always will have — Adam Lanzas and Elliot Rodgers. The
sobering fact is that there is little we can do to predict or change human
behavior, particularly violence; it is a lot easier to control its expression,
and to limit deadly means of self-expression. In every state, we should prevent
individuals with a known history of serious psychiatric illness or substance
abuse, both of which predict increased risk of violence, from owning or
purchasing guns.

Let’s imagine that states do not hand out gun permits to
people who suffer severe psychiatric illness. If a schizophrenic wants to
commit gun violence would he not be likely to avoid mental health treatment. If
he cannot be committed involuntarily, how are the authorities to know about his
illness?

As for substance abuse, how can state employees know whether
someone is an addict without, for example, some kind of test? And, what about people
who are abusing medication that has been duly prescribed by a physician? Aren’t
more and more people are becoming addicted to prescription painkillers?

Of course, the campaign for gun control will have no effect
on those who, like Rodger kill with knives, or on those who, like Lanza use
someone else’s guns.

Last Saturday Dr. Robi Ludwig said this about Elliot Rodger
on Fox News:

When I
was first listening to him, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s angry with women for
rejecting him.’ And then I started to have a different idea: Is this somebody
who is trying to fight against his homosexual impulses? Was he angry with women
because they were taking away men from him?

Now, it
is perfectly reasonable to react to this bizarre conjecture with outrage and disgust. Ample
evidence had, by that point, already illustrated that the shootings
were committed by a man who craved sex with women but couldn’t obtain it. Ludwig’s
claim, then, is totally baseless, leaving us to wonder whether her comments
were motivated less by professional expertise than by anti-gay animus.

But
taking such questions seriously is really granting Fox—and Ludwig—far too much
credit. Ludwig’s claims weren’t just inaccurate; they were absolutely
ridiculous, a spectacle of inane doltishness. By dredging the depths of her
paranoia for the most laughably exaggerated homophobia imaginable, Ludwig’s
remarks crescendoed past the usual droning doublespeak of Fox News’ bigotry and
denialism to an altogether higher register of bleak, unintentionally satirical
commentary on the limitlessness of Fox’s own lunacy. There is much to be angry
about in this world, starting with the misogyny that still permeates our
culture and seems
to have driven Elliot Rodger to kill. But let us not waste our
precious moments earnestly decrying the ramblings of a fool on a third-rate
cable news channel that is already imploding before our eyes.

Why am I mentioning this?

Because, whatever you think of Ludwig’s thought, it is, essentially, pure Freud. To anyone who knows anything about psychoanalysis, the
provenance is unmistakable.

Most people think well of Michelle Obama. To use the phrase
that her husband famously directed at Hillary Clinton, she’s “likable enough.”

Now that her effort to take control over the nation’s school
lunchrooms has been failing, she has decided to do as her
husband did: to politicize the issue by blaming the right wing.

One suspects that this is going to impact her favorability
ratings, unfavorably.

Yesterday she said:

The
last thing that we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids’
health, especially when we’re finally starting to see some progress on this
issue,” Mrs. Obama told the group, adding, “It’s unacceptable to me not just as
first lady, but as a mother.

Yet, the real problem is not the Republican Congress. It’s
the simple fact that children refuse to eat what Mrs. Obama thinks they should
eat.

They are rebelling against tyrannical authority. What could
be more acceptable than that?

Besides, for all we know, a menu that is designed to make
children into “indolent herbivores” does not fulfill their nutritional needs.

With
First Lady Michelle Obama pushing healthy foods in school, half a dozen Boston
schools were among those who bought into lunchroom salad bars in the battle
against childhood obesity. A couple years later, none remain – to the chagrin
of parents hoping to pry their kids away from junk food….

The
school salad bars were a pilot program scrapped amid cost overruns, sanitary
concerns, and according to some, the simple truth that very few kids partook.

But the
new menus were the most austere measure yet, cutting kid-friendly favorites
like chocolate milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, and nachos. Instead, little
Jayden and Mia would
dine on vegetarian curries, tostada salad, and fresh pears.

A
student rebellion ensued—kids brought Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to school rather than
much on quinoa salad—and L.A. Unified was forced to settle for a middle ground
between Alice Waters and Ronald McDonald.

Under
the new new menu,
“Hamburgers will be offered daily,” the L.A. Times reported.
“Some of the more exotic dishes are out, including the beef jambalaya,
vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and
black-eyed pea salads. And the Caribbean meatball sauce will be changed to the
more familiar teriyaki flavor.”

How is it all working out? The Atlanticdoes not paint a
very optimistic picture:

But a
new study suggests that despite the softened menu standards, students are still
beelining toward carbs and meat and avoiding fruits and vegetables.

For the study, published in
the April issue of Preventative
Medicine, researchers examined the lunch trays of 2,000 randomly
selected Angeleno middle schoolers over five consecutive days. Though the
students are offered a fruit and a vegetable each day, 32 percent of students
did not take the fruit from the line, and almost 40 percent did not take the
vegetables. Among those whodid take
a fruit or vegetable, 22 percent threw away the fruit and 31 percent tossed the
vegetables without eating a single bite.

So in
essence, just over half the students both took and ate some fruit, and about 42
percent both took and ate a vegetable.

Salads
were the most common vegetable to be left untouched, while whole fruits, like
apples and oranges, were far less popular than fruit cups or juices. Girls were
both more likely to take fruits and vegetables from the line and were less
likely to waste them.

Wanna-be tyrants like Michelle Obama, who want only the best
for you, believe that these healthy food choices are exactly what children
need. They think that they are being challenged to take control of children’s
minds. They are so convinced that their idea of nutrition is more accurate than a child's free choice that they are willing to impose it on the recalcitrant young. Those who favor these programs have learned from behavioral economics
that if you force children to eat what is good for them, eventually they will
learn to like it.

At a time when nutritionists have discovered that high fat
diets do not necessarily cause obesity, this pursuit of folly deserves to be
called out.

In the meantime, Mrs. Obama does not just want to dictate
what children eat for lunch. She has now set her sights on a higher goal:
policing thought.

Aside from the fact that many children are becoming indolent
herbivores, they are also being taught political correctness in school. So,
Michelle Obama wants these children to police the thought of their
friends, parents, and grandparents.

Obviously, some of the thoughts are reprehensible, but do we
really want to turn children against their parents. Isn’t this what they do in
totalitarian dictatorships when they are trying to root out
counterrevolutionaries?

And, why would they not report their parents to the secret
police? Why would they then not report their parents’ errant thoughts and sick
jokes on social media?

“[O]ur
laws may no longer separate us based on our skin color, but nothing in the
Constitution says we have to eat together in the lunchroom, or live together in
the same neighborhoods. There’s no court case against believing in stereotypes
or thinking that certain kinds of hateful jokes or comments are funny.”

To
address these limitations in the law, Obama asked students to take steps to
“drag my generation and your grandparents’ generation along with you” in the
fight against racism.

“Maybe
that starts simply in your own family, when grandpa tells that off-colored joke
at Thanksgiving, or you’ve got an aunt [that] talks about ‘those people,’” she
said. “Well, you can politely inform them that they’re talking about your
friends.

“Or
maybe it’s when you go off to college and you decide to join a sorority or
fraternity, and you ask the question, how can we get more diversity in our next
pledge class?” she added. “Or maybe it’s years from now, when you’re on the job
and you’re the one who asks, do we really have all the voices and viewpoints we
need at this table?

Being a radical leftist means never admitting to failure. If
your school lunch program does not work, blame the right wing. If your
affirmative action program has not integrated public schools, blame the elderly
for their impure thoughts.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

I doubt that Jeffrey Pfeffer has inside information about
why Jill Abramson was fired by the New York Times, but if the stories about
Abramson’s abrasiveness are half-true, she probably failed to cultivate the
right relationships.

Leadership and management do not involve telling people what
to do. They do not involve self-assertion or leaning-in. They do require that
you develop and sustain good relationships with those above you and those below
you.

Good managers set policy. They also create the best conditions
for the implementation of that policy. It cannot occur if the leader does not
have good relationships with others.

To be clear, the basis for such relationships is respect and
courtesy. It has nothing to do with sharing personal or intimate information.

Pfeffer emphasizes the most difficult aspect of management, getting
other people to do their best work:

You
have to make them work, not only to get things done in the web of interdependencies
that characterize most jobs, but also to keep your position. Leaders need
support—from their subordinates, customers, and most importantly, their bosses.
When that support vanishes, so do their careers. This lesson holds true
regardless of your job performance and track record.

Most managers know that they must manage their staff. They
should also take special care to manage their superiors. Abramson’s problem was
not merely the complaints of her staff, but her failure to develop a good relationship
with her boss, Arthur Sulzberger.

Pfeffer writes:

And
everyone, even chief executives and executive editors, has a boss. Insufficient
attention to managing relationships with bosses, such as boards of directors,
has cost many otherwise talented and successful people their jobs—witness, as
one example, last
summer’s ousting of Men’s Wearhouse (MW) founder
and emblematic spokesperson, George Zimmer, from his role as chairman of the
board.

First, Pfeffer explains how not to do it. What should you
not do when you are hired to manage people who want to have your job, or who
think that they ought to have your job:

There
are many natural human responses to such circumstances. One is to ignore your
rivals and enemies. Another is to try to show everyone around you how smart you
are and how much you deserve the job, in the hope that outstanding job
performance will win them over. A third is to try to hire your own team and
replace your enemies, a strategy that often can’t be implemented and has its
own risks as you bring in other, inexperienced (albeit loyal) people to help
you run a complex operation.

Evidently, such an approach foments contention and conflict.
Some respond by complaining or even politicizing the problem, but it is better
to learn how to manage a situation.

Pfeffer offers some suggestions:

… identify
the most critical relationships, those individuals crucial to both your success
and the success of the business, and nurture those relationships. This entails
asking people’s opinions, even if you don’t think their views are likely to be
helpful. It means telling people what you are doing and why—sharing information
with them so they never feel left out. Serving relationships means going to
visit people in their offices, not yours, and in countless other ways showing
others that you value them, their experience, and their expertise.

Note well the importance of being open and transparent.
People who feel that they are part of an enterprise work more effectively than
do those who believe that they are working in a vacuum.

And note the importance of generosity and humility. You
should not merely be keeping everyone informed, but you do well to drop into
your subordinate’s office. It is surely better than summoning him to yours.

It is worth emphasizing, with Pfeffer, that relationships do
not just happen. They require a considerable amount of work, made more
difficult when you do not much like the people you are working with:

Working
on relationships with people you may not like or even respect is difficult
work, which is precisely why executive tenure is often so short. After a while,
people forget how tenuous everyone’s hold on power is and get tired of the
important but often mundane tasks of serving critical relationships.